Victoria’s hot seats week three as it happened: Adam Bandt DJs like nobody is watching (but everyone is); How much will Gaza conflict matter in Wills?

Just when we thought Hot Seats had wrapped for the week, here’s a bonus Easter egg for our devoted readers.

Good Friday party people at legendary Melbourne club Revolver were in for a surprise when regular Friday night DJ Mike Callander was joined in ‘the cage’ by an upstart on the decks: Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt.

Bandt, whose Melbourne electorate now takes in “Revs” – as the nightclub on Chapel Street in Prahran is fondly known – played for about 90 minutes into the early hours of Saturday morning, wearing a white T-shirt, and a white cap emblazoned with the words “vote”.

Punters were shocked – and delighted – to find he had both excellent taste in music and the skills to get everyone dancing.

As I’ve moved through the Wills electorate over the past three weeks, one of the hardest things to gauge is how the war in Gaza will shape the result at the ballot box.

For those deeply engaged in the issue – many of them Greens or minor party voters – Labor’s response is unacceptable to a conflict where more than 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its invasion in response to the Hamas attacks in late 2023 which killed 1300 people. For them the conflict is likely a decisive factor in how they’ll vote.

What’s less clear is how much the broader electorate is paying attention. Labor campaigners insist it’s not an issue that comes up much on the ground.

When the Australian Electoral Commission finalised the redistribution of Kooyong bringing in 26,000 additional voters from Toorak and surrounding areas, chatter immediately turned to what it would mean for teal independent Monique Ryan.

The consensus was swift: the new boundaries, which carved out parts of Kooyong and added in chunks of the now-abolished seat of Higgins, were seen as a win for the Liberal Party — and a problem for Ryan, pushing her hold on the seat from 2.9 per cent to 2.2 per cent.

It even saw a short-lived push for former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to return and try take the seat back. But election analyst Ben Raue, founder of the blog and podcast The Tally Room, sees things differently.

In flyers sent to voters in recent weeks, Hill describes himself as a “genuine local” who “grew up in the south-eastern suburbs”.

There has been a persistent rumour thought that this isn’t the full story. One of the first things I heard when I started covering Bruce for this blog were whispers that Hill lives in the city, and drives to the electorate each day.

The claim was repeated and twisted by voters I spoke with on the street, and Liberal campaign staffers pushing the message through Zahid Safi’s social media.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has accused teal independents of being “Greens in disguise,” escalating his attacks on the crossbench as controversy brews over push polling in key inner-city seats.

“This fraud has to stop,” Dutton said at a press conference in Mt Dee in NSW on Thursday, claiming many teal supporters were “Greens who have now got a teal T-shirt on”.

“At least the Greens have the honesty to stand up and say, ‘We’re Greens – we’ve got crazy policies, sure, but you should know that going into the election’,” he said.

Independent MP Zoe Daniel says she was unaware of the controversial phone polling undertaken by Climate 200 in her electorate and claimed it was not push-polling.

My colleague, Olivia Ireland, reported today that Climate 200 has been using robocalls to spruik teal MPs, including Daniel, and tarnish their opponents under the banner of conducting polling, a practice commonly referred to as “push-polling”.

Fellow teal MP Monique Ryan told the ABC on Thursday morning that push-polling was “not ideal” and that she was not aware of it occurring in her seat. Shortly after that TV appearance, my Hot Seats blog colleague, Rachael Dexter, broke the story that apparent push-polling, focused on the Liberal Party’s nuclear policy, had been conducted in Ryan’s seat of Kooyong.

Daniel, the MP for Goldstein, said the poll in her seat was not commissioned, paid for or put into the field by her campaign.